Of Jasper and Coral. Representation of Women in Black African Francophone Cinema

by Maria Coletti

English abstract

English abstract of the book on women in black african cinema published by Marsilio in 2001, after a Phd Research in Roma Tre University (Rome, 1998-2000)

The analysis of the construction of female characters in African films offers a great range of themes and levels of interpretation, especially if compared to African oral tradition and literature, on one hand, and to African postcolonial history, on the other hand. Since its birth, African cinema has given particular importance to women as a symbol of the struggle of the entire continent in search for its freedom from Colonialism and trying to reappropriate its lost or damaged identity.
In order to approach this subject at best, I chose to work on a well defined and homogeneous field and to concentrate my study on Sub-Saharan Francophone countries, where Black African cinema took his first steps, also due to the well known assimilationist French cultural politics.

I focused in particular on a corpus of films who consider female characters as their symbolic center, creating a sort of “petite histoire” of Sub-Saharan Francophone cinema, in a double way: diachronically and synchronically. From an historical point of view these films can mark different periods and trends, while from a narrative point of view they reveal different ways of confronting with female characters, through recurrent themes and symbols. Contextualizing these texts in the light of historical and social processes and of oral and literary heritage has helped me to reveal the adherence or, in the contrary, the opposition to traditional female archetypes.

The central aim of this study is to analyze the construction of the female characters in Sub-Saharan Francophone films from a gender point of view, utilizing some categories inspired to the Feminist Film Theory.

The first chapter of the book is dedicated to a panorama of the female typologies both in oral and in literary tradition – with a particular accent given to the “revolution” of Women Literature – in order to explore the different ways in which the social and cultural imagery is reflected in the filmed image.

In the second chapter, I question the 60 film chosen as the corpus of this study, looking through the three focal lenses of Voice, Body and Image, inspired to the reflections on race, gender and difference as theorized by feminist film theories.

The third chapter focuses on the textual analysis of 9 films, divided in three temporal groups from 1966 to 1999: a sort of journey in Sub-Saharan Francophone cinema not only from an esthetical point of view and as a reflection on gender, but also as an historical and political process.